Retreating the Political

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by Jean-Luc Nancy and Phillippe Lacoue-Labarthe,

Edited by Simon Sparks

Routledge

Due/Published July 1997, 232 pages, paper

ISBN 0415151635

Retreating the Political presents many of the key issues at the heart of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy's work. Published for the first time in English, the book presents some of the key motifs that have characterized their work--their debt to a Heideggerian pre-understanding of philosophy; the centrality of the "figure" in western philosophy and the totalitarianism of both politics and the political. Through contemporary readings of the political in Freud, Heidegger, and Marx, they reveal how philosophy relies on the political for its representation and reinvention, and how it has done so ever since Socrates' meditation on the polis.